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<\/a>For a man who is apparently Britain\u2019s most influential Muslim, Shaikh Abdul Hakim Murad has rather unorthodox views on the way Islam is presented in the Western media. \u201cI don\u2019t think Islam is ever covered,\u201d he tells Weekend Review.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have never actually seen an article in a Western newspaper that covers the core aspects of Islamic religion that are of significance to Muslims themselves. The focus is exclusively on social, economic and political dimensions of the religion. I have done interviews with journalists who say they don\u2019t want to talk about the religious dimensions of Islam. That\u2019s just the nature of modern Britain, unfortunately \u2014 we are going through a very secular period.\u201d<\/p>\n
Is there an Islam fatigue in Britain? \u201cI think it\u2019s not just an Islam fatigue,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s that people have been told everything about Islam except what makes it significant to Muslims themselves, which is often why they are so mystified.\u201d<\/p>\n
I am sitting with Murad \u2014 also known as Dr Timothy Winter \u2014 in his office at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University. Around us on both sides are shelved an ocean of books, including many on Islam and religion with titles such as Ibn Batuta and Islam and Taoism, some in distant foreign languages (Murad speaks Arabic, Persian and Turkish).<\/p>\n
While he is speaking, I wonder whether this rather bookish, almost quintessential scholar of the Oxbridge type could really be Britain\u2019s most influential Muslim, as voted by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, based in Jordan. It has compiled a list of 500 most influential Muslims in the world.<\/p>\n
Murad himself dismisses his lofty new title. \u201cIt\u2019s a little bit of silliness, isn\u2019t it?\u201d he asks. \u201cI don\u2019t know how you could rank such people. I am sure if you would ask most Muslims in England they would certainly name other people. They wouldn\u2019t have heard of me.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy interests are rather abstract, philosophical and academic. Most Muslims in Britain are interested in more practical bread and butter issues. So I think it was probably a curious misunderstanding that led them to put my name on the list.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Muslim celebrity he may not be like the boxer Amir Khan or singer Yousuf Islam, but Murad is certainly a well-respected figure among Muslims, not only in Britain but also internationally, as a leading Islamic scholar. He holds a number of prestigious titles, including director of the Sunna Project, secretary of the Muslim Academic Trust and director of the Anglo-Muslim Fellowship for Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n
Last year he helped set up the Cambridge Muslim College, which trains imams for mosques in the United Kingdom. Murad is also very active in the local community and is heading a new mosque-building project in Cambridge, set to replace the present one which is stretched to capacity, with worshippers being forced to pray on the street outside.<\/p>\n
Born in 1960, Murad converted to Islam at the age of 19. Back then, many people in Britain did not know much about the religion. The reaction from others to his new faith was one of curiosity. \u201cThe main concern was that I might have joined a cult,\u201d he says. \u201cThat I was being manipulated by some evil puppet master, which was a fear among middle-class parents at the time. It was an age when cults were spreading very fast in Western countries. But as soon as it became clear that\u2019s not what I was interested in, I think their anxieties receded.\u201d<\/p>\n
Compared to Britain\u2019s total Muslim population, estimated at 2.4 million, converts form a small percentage at an estimated 60,000 to 70,000.<\/p>\n
However, one odd bit of fact about converts in this country is that they sometimes keep their Islamic faith a secret by not telling others, according to Murad.<\/p>\n
He attributes this strange phenomenon partly to an English sense of reticence. \u201cWe call them submarines,\u201d he explains. \u201cPeople who are under the surface and are practising the religion, including praying and fasting. But their close friends and family don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n
For instance, Murad knows one professor at Cambridge University who has been a Muslim for 30 years and comes to the mosque when he can but his colleagues at the university aren\u2019t aware he is a Muslim. Then there is a Christian clergyman who converted to Islam but hasn\u2019t told his wife because he is sure she wouldn\u2019t understand and would divorce him and he would end up losing the children.<\/p>\n
But while the case of some converts can at times be rather awkward, Murad himself has lived quite a colourful life as a Muslim. Since graduating from Cambridge University with a first-class honours in Arabic in 1983, he travelled to Egypt, where he studied Islam at the renowned Al Azhar University. He lived for three years in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, before returning to London to study Turkish and Persian. Murad is at present the Shaikh Zayed Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Cambridge University.<\/p>\n
Muslims are sometimes criticised for apparently having developed a \u201cvictim mentality\u201d \u2014 and some prominent Islamic thinkers have also kind of agreed with this. Does Murad concur?
\n\u201cI don\u2019t find that particularly among Muslim communities,\u201d he says. \u201cThe kind of Muslim leaders who the media notice may well think that Muslims are being unfairly singled out. That the West didn\u2019t come to their rescue in Bosnia, the West has been indifferent to their fate in Palestine, the West did something to Iraq that it would never have done to, say, Spain under General Franco. That it is behaving in a cavalier fashion in Afghanistan. That it supports unpopular autocratic regimes throughout the Muslim world \u2014 and therefore the West is generically hostile to Muslims and victimises them. I think that is a ridiculous oversimplification.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are some Muslims who resent the fact that so many of the victims of Western foreign policy have been Muslims. But I don\u2019t think that is the prevailing view of most mosque-going Muslims in the UK. They are more interested in immediate bread and butter issues of getting jobs, educating their children and finding their way into society.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alongside his passionate defence of Britain\u2019s Muslim community, Murad is known for speaking eloquently about those who have gone to the extreme within the religion. I ask him how he would argue, using religion, against these people who find themselves at the radical fringe?<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, one has to do it using the traditional instruments of Muslim debate, which are Quran and Hadith quotations with reference to the past consensus of the scholars of the religion,\u201d he says. \u201cThat debate is easily won because the radicals very seldom have a very proper religious education.<\/p>\n
\u201cBin Laden is an engineer, Zawahiri is a medic. The typical profile of the radical Islamist is not that he is an expert on Islam, rather it is that he is somebody with a Western technical type of education who is sufficiently incensed by Western policies that he is using an Islamic language misunderstood to justify what is essentially a temper tantrum.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Bombing Without Moonlight: The Origins of Suicidal Terrorism, Murad argues that an Islamist suicide bomber is very much a by-product of a Westernised mindset and is in fact an alien phenomenon to the religion of Islam when viewed from a historical context. In the book, he notes how many on both sides will furiously deny an \u201cIslamism with Western roots\u201d. Suicidal militancy is, he points out, entirely absent from the Islamic scriptures. But shouldn\u2019t one be weary of labels such as \u201cmoderate\u201d Islam because it gives the impression of some type of \u201cIslam lite\u201d that people should be following? In other words, it is as if there is something wrong with following the religion in its fullness.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, you may say we have two alternatives,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have the alternative of being Muslim extremists or being extremely Muslim. And I don\u2019t accept the category of moderate at all because it is far from clear. Because when it is used usually by Western pundits and politicians, what is intended is anything other than a form of Islam that politically doesn\u2019t obstruct present Western policies. And I don\u2019t think that is a helpful way of developing a meaningful sense of priorities within a religion. So I don\u2019t use this category \u2018moderate\u2019 Muslims at all. I think the ongoing face-off between radicals and the mainstream is a face-off between heresy and orthodoxy. Those are the terms which are more indigenous and authentic than \u2018moderation\u2019 and \u2018extremism\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
This brings the discussion back to where this interview started: the great Islam debate in the media. Murad believes there is little point in expecting a more accurate account of Islam in the British tabloid press. Instead, he tells me what worries him is that among the educated classes in the UK, who, to some extent, conduct their conversation through the more respectable broadsheets, there is an unwillingness to acknowledge that non-Western cultures may have definitions of happiness and human flourishing which could be worthy of respect and have a right to exist.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is something implicitly totalitarian about the assumption that the value set esteemed by Westerners must alone be right,\u201d he says. \u201cThis comes from the universalism of the Enlightenment, which thought that \u2018man\u2019 was a single sort of subject and about whom large generalisations could always be offered.\u201d<\/p>\n
More recently, he acknowledges, such thinking has come under a good deal of attack. \u201cBut that does not seem to have percolated to the public sphere,\u201d he says, \u201cwhere it is assumed that the West alone can define \u2018universals\u2019, such as \u2018universal human rights\u2019, even though philosophically Western thinkers have an increasingly hard time establishing any universals at all. Some thinkers, such as Gavin D\u2019Costa, Geoffrey Stout \u2014 and, I think, Slavoj Zizek \u2014 are very aware of this paradox. D\u2019Costa\u2019s new book holds that everything Westerners say to other cultures can be reduced to variations on \u2018Be like us\u2019. That\u2019s not entirely accurate, of course.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clearly, it would be wrong to put the entire burden of blame on the shoulders of the West. Murad believes part of the problem is the reluctance so far of Muslim states and agencies to encourage a broader and more thoughtful cultural discussion in the West which is rooted in a better understanding of Muslim culture.<\/p>\n
He gives the example of the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan, whose Alliance of Civilisations at times seems to attempt such an effort. But if Middle Easterners really wish to be better respected in the West, he believes they need to engage in deep and extensive cultural investment. \u201cThe Arab League, or the OIC, should direct resources to creating something like the British Council,\u201d he says, \u201cor the Goethe Institute, with landmark institutions in Western capitals which promote a correct understanding and a healthy dialogue. At the forefront should be teaching the Arabic language. Unless the Muslim world engages in better public diplomacy on behalf of its culture, it cannot expect to be better understood and respected.\u201d<\/p>\n
Syed Hamad Ali is an independent writer based in Cambridge.<\/em><\/p>\n For more information or to make donations, log on to www.cambridgemosqueismoving.org.uk<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWe have the alternative of being Muslim extremists or being extremely Muslim. And I don\u2019t accept the category of “moderate” at all because it is far from clear. Because when it is used usually by Western pundits and politicians, what is intended is anything other than a form of Islam that politically doesn\u2019t obstruct present Western policies…”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[57],"class_list":["post-4170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-abdal-hakim-murad","column","twocol"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/khutbahbank.org.uk\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/khutbahbank.org.uk\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/khutbahbank.org.uk\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/khutbahbank.org.uk\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/khutbahbank.org.uk\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/khutbahbank.org.uk\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/khutbahbank.org.uk\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/khutbahbank.org.uk\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/khutbahbank.org.uk\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}